Biblical Criticism

1. Was the Genesis Flood global in extent or just local? Genesis chapters six to eight give a detailed account of a devastating flood brought about by God as a judgment upon Man. Genesis 7:18-24 leaves no doubt that this Flood was global: all the highest hills were covered, all the creatures on the dry land died and only Noah and his family and representatives of all animal life survived the ordeal. Upon leaving the Ark, 376 days later, God gave Noah a covenant promise to never again destroy the earth by a flood (Gen. 9:11).

1. Throughout history there have always been those who believe that life began on earth by supernatural creation and others who prefer to stick with the naturalistic explanation that life began spontaneously by chance events from non-living matter. The first view, the biblical view, is called biogenesis meaning that life can only come from pre-existing life.

The December 1, 1986, issue of Time magazine (128:75) reported the case of prodigy Stephen Baccus who, at 17, had just become the youngest known person ever to be sworn in as a lawyer in the United States. He graduated from high school at 12 and from university at 14. Such cases are uncommon and tend to catch the attention of the popular media.

The KJV. England's King James I ordered a new translation of the entire Bible from the then existing Hebrew and Greek manuscripts into English. The English translators used The Bishop's Bible of 1568 plus what came to be called textus receptus or received text. This consisted of the 1550 Greek NT of the French scholar/printer Stephanus (alias Francois Estienne, 1502-1550, who introduced our familiar verse divisions) and the 1598 Beza NT Greek based upon the five Greek texts used by the Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536).

To discuss this topic meaningfully, we necessarily must think in terms of a recent creation. If we are thinking in terms of five billion years of earth's history, about one or two billion years of life's history, and about one or two million years of human history, the study of the world before the flood would be more or less without meaning. One would then have to think in terms of a local flood, and the world before such a flood would be no different from the world after the flood.

Footnotes:

By Henry M. Morris, Ph.D., Professor of Hydraulic Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, Virginia and Chairman of Creation Research Society. This talk was delivered at the Creation Seminar, Springfield, Illinois on July 8, 1968.
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It's no surprise that the history taught in our schools is a rather dull subject. Virtually all events in history, particularly European history, were motivated by religious causes: Muslims massacred Christians, Catholics slaughtered Protestants, Protestants killed Catholics, and all parties persecuted Jews. In the 1800s schools were run by religious authorities, and children attended the school of their parents' faith.

Footnotes:

Boorstin, Daniel. 1983. The Discoverers. New York: Random House.

Draper, John W. 1874. History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. New York: Appleton.

Irving, Washington. 1829. The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. New York: J.J. Harper. The entire presentation of the confrontation between Columbus and the church authorities at Salamanca was a product of Irving's imagination!

1. It is a wonderous thing for us human beings to have the Word of God, that very same powerful Word which formed the stars in space out of nothing and charged them with their incredible energy, among us for our use in the form of the Bible. Hebrews 11:3 gives us some sense of this power of the Word of God. The world in which we live is very real and it contains some incredible forces. Yet it, along with the stars, are all a result of God's directive use of that powerful Word.

In our time many people believe that the creation account is a myth and they deny what the Bible says regarding the flood of Noah. No wisdom of man or scientific knowledge can solve the mystery of creation; only God can tell us in His book, the Bible.

To understand the tragedy of the Flood, we must answer the question, "Are the masses of water now on earth in the same places as when God created the earth?" Land masses now comprise only 21 percent to 22 percent of the earth's surface while the remaining 78 or 79 percent is water. According to the Bible it has not always been so.

1. Introduction. Since the Creation Satan has had an agenda to replace the Creator God as the object of Man’s worship by himself. We recall that Man was made in the image of God and needs to worship his Creator. Satan’s attack has consisted of destroying God’s revealed truth to Man (the Bible) then so corrupting Man that Satan himself may be deified as God on earth.

1. The discovery of the colored peoples by the Caucasian Christian West in the 16th century caused some to doubt that the Genesis Flood had been universal since the only family on the Ark were surely Caucasion! Later, at the time of the Industrial Revolution and during the search for coal and minerals, it was realized that rocks appeared in layers or stratum, each of different composition from those layers above and below.

1. Historically, the western mind has, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, considered the earth to be only a few thousand years old and this was based upon the Biblical account and the ensuing genealogies given into historical times. Following European and Elizabethan exploration, questions of race were raised and doubts cast upon the universality of the Genesis Flood.

Footnotes:

A preserved coelacanth at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco. Courtesy of BrokenSphere. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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